Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (274 mails)

[Sergei Klink <sklink@xxxxxxxxx>]

On April 16, 2004 11:03 am, Örn Hansen wrote:
> fredag 16 april 2004 16:12 skrev Andreas Bittner:
> > agree, but even better, switch hardware....
> >
> > wonder why anyone is really buying crap from hardware
> > manufacturers that dont really fully support the idea behind the
> > os community. dont buy stuff that only gets supported in a
> > crippled or "abnormal" way.
> >

AFAIK ther's no other way with 3D cards. I'm happy to go into all 
sorts of trouble(ordering from another country, paying significantly 
more, etc), and, in fact, I do that sometimes, but what if there's 
just no other choice, and I've been living with my mach64 and 
Riva128ZX (crap crap crap) for years, and really need something newer 
now(now I have a Radeon 9000 and FX5200, and I'm about equally 
unsatisfied by both, in different aspects)...

> > consumers have the real power to change things, only very few of
> > them realize this.
>
>   I'm not going on a flame war, since I don't really mind what card
> I'm running on my linux, it only needs to fit my budget, be good
> and work with linux.
>

Well, that's kind of the point here. AFAIK there's no such card, 
unfortunately - there's no decent 3D card for any price that would 
have decent opensource drivers(actually, I'm not even sure if there's 
such thing as decent proprietary drivers, certainly not nvidia's ;)))

>   On that end, has anyone tried, taking the 32bit 5336 nvidia glx
> routines, and bundle them along with 64bit 5332 nvidia glx
> routines?  Wouldn't that be possible, since one fits in lib64 and
> the other in lib? theoretically?

Yes, in fact, some 3d apps _do_ work with 32bit Mesa/64bit nvidia 
combination(not exactly great, some textures are just black or grey, 
but the app(ET in my case) does run). The workaround doing exactly 
that, using indirect rendering by setting a variable, was described 
somewhere on the mandrake-amd64 list and traces of it on nvidia 
forums, but....you know, it doesn't work all that well :) Sometimes, 
for some people(not me) the performance is OK, but random app crashes 
are normal with this way. Look on nvnews.net forums, there's some 
information on that, but this is an ugly workaround and don't expect 
any miracles.

Btw, from reading the forums, I got the impression that nvidia linux 
developers were either on holidays or just stopped working in the 
last couple of months... ATI, on the other hand, updated the FAQ with 
at least the mention of 64bit drivers (oh, finally!), but still no 
visible signs of any progress. So IMHO the best card to have now 
would probably be Radeon 9200, and the best drivers would be the ones 
included with the kernel/X (to whoever set up the kernel-of-the-day 
repository, thanks a lot :).